The super switch

Many moons ago I bought a Yamaha Pacifica 812w (a superstrat); I quickly discovered that it had a really great pickup selector switch:

• The normal strat switch is a 5 way 1 pole switch, allowing the 3 pickups to be selected individually, then the 2 "inbetween" positions where two adjacent pickups are put in parallel.
• The Pacifica had an incredible 5 way 4 pole switch; i.e. there were for separate 5 way switches. They were barely used in the default wiring, and this was a waste...

The Problem

I love strats, but having played the Pacifica a bit I found I was only really using the neck pickup, the neck/mid inbetween (for when I wanted some strat quack), and the bridge humbucker. The bridge coil tap sounded thin and uninteresting, as did the mid pickup paralleled with one of the humbucker coils.

I also found myself yearning after a thicker, meatier sound (like a neck humbucker).

The (Current) Solution

After much playing with it, I found a way of wiring the guitar to have the following options:

• 1: Neck
• 2: Neck/mid paralleled (Strat quack)
• 3: Neck/mid in series as per a humbucker. This gives a fat, laid back sound
• 4: Neck/mid in series paralleled with the bridge humbucker. This gives a les paul like in-between sound
• 5: The bridge humbucker. This gives the most aggressive sound.

Hear it in action below

If you want to re-create this you can try to decode my wiring diagrams below. Good luck :-)